Jivox provides templates for creating online video ads. Now, knowing my readership, I know that most of you will absolutely hate this company. But it is an interesting idea for not only online publishers, but also bricks and mortar companies.

Jivox online video advertising is a powerful new way to tell your customers about your business beyond the visual and geographic limitations of search engines and banners. With Jivox, you can easily create Free professional video advertisements for your business with music, visuals, and more. Through the exclusive Jivox network your ad will appear “on the digital air.” Jivox pinpoints the sites your customers go to in the markets you need to reach them. You only pay for the actual sites where your video ad runs.

Once you create your free ad, you then define demographics of your target audience and set the budget for the ad. Jivox then takes over and sells the ad within their own network and that is where this startup intends to make money. Do it yourself business people are a good market to go after, especially with free services.

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Non-profit organization Takes All Types released their very own Facebook application which will help find blood donors quickly. Users install the application, tell it their location and blood type, and choose how often they are will to be contacted to donate blood. If a shortage in blood occurs, TAT will contact users via the Facebook, email, or text message — whichever option you have authorized them to use. It’s nice to see social networking sites finally having a good use. The organization is looking to expand in to other social media sites and “advanced communication systems.”

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Topicle is a search engine community built by users handpicking URLs. The community creates new Topicle search engines for topics. URLs are added to each search engine by users. Those URLs are then rated by other members of the community before being included in the Topicle. Topicle uses Google Custom Search to search the selected sites.

For example, the Web 2.0 Topicle includes reddit.com, readwriteweb.com, digg.com, and others. When searching within the Web 2.0 Topicle, only the 7 “indexed” URLs will be searched. Betaflow is added as a suggested URL, but won’t be include until other Topicle users rate the URL.

The site is an interesting mix of Google’s search power combined with crowd-sourcing. It makes search engine optimization a little less important and all but eliminates the option to spam.

Topicle was founded by Steffen Mueller and Christian Meister. Mueller was a Product Manager for Google, working on Google Maps, Google Web Search, and Froogle.

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Just to show that pretty much any startup can get a little funding I’m going to tell you about Y Combinator startup MightyQuiz. MightyQuiz isn’t a grand idea, it’s not even really much of a new idea. Users write quiz questions on any topic and these questions. The questions are then presented to visitors along with other submitted questions in a quiz format. It’s an educational waste of time.

And in typical Web 2.0 fashion, there are social features to the site. User profiles, top contributor lists, most popular questions, and the ever important widget should give you the 2.0 interaction you desire.

TechCrunch was told that the potential monetization strategy for the company is to offer the service as a web label service for “traditional media site.”

File this one in your time waster bookmarks while it lasts…

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Last week, Google released a beta version of Google Gears for Windows Mobile devices. Gears is an “open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using the following JavaScript APIs:”

• Store and serve application resources locally
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

Gears is supported on Windows Mobile 5+ devices running Internet Explorer Mobile 4.01+. The software is also available for Mac and Linux users running Firefox 1.5+. Developers are working on a version for Safari/WebKit which will hopefully provide service for the iPhone when the iPhone SDK is available for the phone.

Related: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/03/google-gears-goes-mobile/
http://mashable.com/2008/03/03/google-gears-mobile/

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AOL Executive Vice President of Programming, Bill Wilson, announced this week that AOL plans on launching twelve new sites over the next six months and up to 30 sites by the end of the year. Plain and simple, AOL has moved in to the online advertising market and to win in that market you new impressions… lots of impressions. Wilson told Bloomberg.com, “We want to be sure we are appealing to as many consumers as we can.”

AOL sites had a combined total of 109.4 million visitors in January putting the company in fourth place behind Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Microsoft published their own web strategy back in November with some lofty ambitions themselves.

It will be interesting to see if AOL comes up with any innovation in this move. To get traffic and maintain traffic, AOL will have to either offer a service that no one else does, or execute an existing idea better than the competition. But can that deliver innovation, quality, and quantity with great speed. We can only wait and see.

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I saw the news today that Google Calendar Sync was released this week and with much excitement I downloaded the utility to give it a try. I have three calendars that I maintain: a professional calendar in Outlook hooked up to corporate Exchange, a professional calendar in iCal on my Mac, and a personal calendar also in iCal. Synchronizing all three calendars with my iPhone has become a challenge which left me to decide which calendar is most important for easy access… I chose my Outlook calendar. But, with Google Calendar Sync I should get the ability to synchronize my Outlook calendar with Google and then automatically download my Google Calendar in to iCal. Problem solved… or so I thought.

After setting up Calendar Sync the first thing I noticed on Google Calendar is that not all of my events showed up. Upon further investigation, 99% of my events didn’t show up. It turns out that Calendar Sync only sent the events that I had created and only the events that didn’t have any other invitees. Oh well, excitement averted. Back to choosing which calendar is most important.

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